April Dávila

Free Mini Masterclass: Banish Writer's Block Forever! Learn More Here

April Davila - Author

Blog

Embracing the Messy Middle

In writing a novel, there comes a pivotal stage that just about every author faces affectionately known as the “messy middle.” It’s that stage where the initial spark has dimmed slightly and the end still seems a long way off. During this phase, many writers find themselves questioning everything from their plot to their character development, often leading to a daunting and existential: “What am I even doing?” If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, rest assured, you’re not alone.

It’s Normal to Question Everything

The messy middle is a rite of passage for most writers. It’s where the complexities of your narrative are wrestled into coherence, and yes, it’s perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed. The doubts you’re experiencing are not a signal of your inability but rather a common part of the creative process. Each question about your plot or character is actually an opportunity for refinement and depth.

The Role of Self-Doubt

Writing a novel involves weaving our creative magic with a substantial amount of self-doubt. Though it can be unpleasant, this blend is crucial as it pushes you to continually evaluate and re-evaluate your work, ensuring that every element of your story serves its purpose. Feeling uncertain isn’t just common; it’s an integral part of crafting something meaningful. The magic lies in the balance between knowing when to question your work and when to trust the process.

Strategies to Overcome the Messy Middle

  1. Keep Writing: The most straightforward advice is often the hardest to follow. Keep adding words to your manuscript, even if they are not perfect. Progress is incremental and every word written is a step out of the messy middle.
  2. Seek Perspective: Sometimes stepping back from your work or getting an outside opinion can provide new insights. Whether it’s from a fellow writer, a trusted friend, or a professional coach, fresh eyes can help you see what’s working and what isn’t.
  3. Embrace Support: Reach out to your writing community or a mentor. Support from others who understand your journey can be tremendously uplifting. Sometimes, just hearing someone say, “Yes, keep going!” can reignite your motivation and help you push through doubts.
  4. Break Tasks Down: Tackle your writing challenges in smaller, manageable chunks. Instead of overwhelming yourself with the entirety of your novel, focus on resolving one plot point at a time or deepening one character before moving to the next.

You Are Not Alone

Remember that while every writer’s journey is unique, the struggles, particularly in the messy middle, are universally felt. The #WritingCommunity is vast and supportive, filled with individuals who have navigated or are currently navigating this tumultuous phase. Engage with them, share your experiences, and draw strength from the collective perseverance of your peers.

Keep Going

The messy middle might feel endless, but it is just a phase. Every word you write not only brings you closer to the last page but also builds your skills and resilience as a writer. Keep going, because the story only ends when you stop writing. In the meantime, embrace the chaos—it’s all part of the beautiful process of creating something truly great.

Someone Needs to Hear Your Story

I’m not sure who needs to hear this today. Maybe it’s you.

Your story matters.

There are readers out there who need to hear your story.

Remember that your voice and perspective are unlike anyone else’s. Your experiences, emotions, and ideas shape your storytelling, and that uniqueness is what will attract readers who connect with your work on a deep level.

Stories have a profound impact on people’s lives. They entertain, inspire, educate, and challenge readers. Your story has the potential to touch someone’s heart, make them feel understood, or provide them with a fresh perspective. Never underestimate the influence a well-crafted narrative can have on someone’s life.

The world is full of diverse readers with varying interests, backgrounds, and experiences. Your story might resonate with someone who has been yearning for representation or validation. By sharing your unique story, you have the opportunity to create a connection with readers who have been waiting for a narrative like yours.

Your writing has the ability to cultivate empathy and understanding among readers. Through your characters and their journeys, you can bring to light important themes, challenges, and emotions that people may not have considered before. By sharing your story, you contribute to a more compassionate and empathetic world.

Writing is not just about the end result; it’s also a journey of self-expression and personal growth. Even if your story doesn’t reach a wide audience immediately, the act of writing itself can be transformative. It allows you to explore your thoughts, develop your skills, and discover new aspects of yourself. The process of writing is valuable regardless of external validation.

Remember, writing takes time and perseverance. Trust in your voice, stay committed to your craft, and believe that your story has the potential to impact someone’s life in a meaningful way. The world needs storytellers like you, so keep writing and sharing your unique narrative with the world.

And as always, if you could use some support, book a time to chat with me. I work with writers in many different ways, and if the programs I offer aren’t a good fit, I will happily point you toward others. I’m here to help.

Avoiding Detail Overload in Our Writing

A while back, I wrote a post about how details are the key to writing ourselves out of cliché. I shared my take on what a cliché is and how we, as writers, can weed them out.

The very first response I got to that post was from a reader who said he has been accused of using cliché descriptions but who countered with the argument:

I [would] rather hear: easy reading & page turner, instead of “long and unexpected way to describe a deranged mind. Figurative but way too long. Almost put it aside”

I have to admit, there is definitely something to that.

Detail Overload

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know I’m a big believer in not finishing books that don’t grab you (check out my post on 3 Reasons It’s Okay to Stop Reading That Book if you’re curious). On occasion, I will admit to tiring of a book because of the unending descriptions.

So I wanted to write a post about choosing our details wisely to avoid detail overload, which can be just as bad for a story as a boatload of clichés.

Trust One Detail

In The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell, she quotes Walter Murch, master editor, as saying  “…trust one, well-chosen detail to do the work of ten.”

I love that quote because it supports the idea of digging deep for telling details, while at the same time removing any excess that would weigh a story down.

A teacher of mine once said something similar. She said that on our first drafts we should go ahead and drop in all the hyperbolic language we want, to likewise write in all “sky blue” and “fire engine red” clichés that come to mind. It doesn’t matter on the first draft. Those tired images can work just fine as place holders. But when we go back, we should try to edit our writing down to just one perfect adjective. Cut the rest.

That same teacher encouraged us writers to think outside the normal descriptions we already have in our heads. Light doesn’t just shine. It can smooth, dance, and scrape. Consider the homunculus pine tree or the lank marsupial. One of the more fun parts of writing is putting words together in unusual ways, then editing, editing, editing.

Writing As Meditation

Lately I’ve been blogging some about how mindfulness has helped me become a better writer, but saying I practice meditation is like a restaurant saying they serve food. Allow me to explain and to share how I’ve come to treat writing as meditation.

Sunrise. Begin Again. Writing as Meditation

Insight Meditation

Insight meditation is the practice of attempting to see things as they are, in the present moment, without judgement. That’s it. I sit quietly, eyes closed to minimize distraction, and simply notice what I can notice. To give myself something to focus on (and come back to when my mind wanders), I use an anchor. Sometimes it’s my breath. Sometimes it’s the sounds in the room.

What I notice most often is that my mind is racing. I settle my attention on my breath and almost immediately I realize I’m planning dinner. So I come back to my breath. Then suddenly I’m caught up in a memory from when I was eight years old. Back to the anchor. Re-focus. Begin again.

The idea is not to try to keep thoughts out, but rather to notice what thoughts arise, acknowledge them, and then let them go. One of the hardest parts is the “without judgement” bit. Being kind with myself is a big part of the practice. It is both very simple and very challenging.

I often get asked about chanting, visualizations, candles, and special sitting postures. While there are meditation traditions that embrace these things I don’t personally use them in my practice. I do use a bell to mark time if I’m leading a meditation, simply because I like the sound of it. But I always keep in mind that it’s decoration, not essential to the practice of mindfulness.

Writing as Meditation

When I’m writing, I try to treat it as I do meditation. I make the writing the anchor. I start typing and I notice that, all of a sudden, I need to move the laundry along. But instead of mindlessly getting up to move the clothes to the dryer (which would totally derail my writing) I simply notice the thought arise and let it go. I come back to the anchor (my writing) and keep going.

And what about that little voice in my head that likes to tell me that everything I write is crap? If you’ve ever had the experience of writing a sentence, deleting it, writing it again, deleting it again, you know what I’m talking about. When I’m more mindful of the thoughts running in my head I notice the impulse to erase and rewrite. I can give a little mental bow to that inner critic, say “thank you for your opinion, you can f*ck off now” and just keep writing.

Once I get in the flow, that part of my brain stops pestering me. In fact, that’s what flow is. It’s the quieting of that inner chatter and a complete focus on the task at hand. Hours can fly by and often do. It takes practice. And the more I practice, the more easily I can get into that state of flow where my creativity flourishes.

Side note: that inner critic is a glorious editor. I would never banish her forever, only for first drafts. Once I’ve got a draft down and it’s time for editing, I let her run like an ostrich across the savanna. For more on that check out this post I wrote about Right View for Better Editing.

Quieting the Monkey Mind

In a recent podcast interview on the Ezra Klein show, George Saunders (author of, most recently, “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain“) talks about treating his writing like an anchor in meditation and how “rumination falls away” when he’s writing. He uses a phrase often used when describing our busy brains: the monkey mind – always swinging from one branch of thought to the next. He talks about how writing can quiet that monkey mind.

In the interview, Saunders shares many insights on the intersection of mindfulness and writing. It’s definitely worth a listen if this is something you’re interested in (and if you’ve read this far, I’m assuming you are), but the part I’m specifically referencing begins around minute 11, in case you want to jump right to it.

Write On

Meditating for a few minutes before I begin writing is the best way I have found to find the flow of my writing. It’s a sentiment that I hear over and over again in my Mindful Writing Community. People who have never meditated before, or who have never used meditation to quiet their minds before writing are floored to realize how the two practices go so well together.

If you feel you could use some guidance, please consider applying for the Mindful Writing Community.

The First Page of Your Novel

The First Page of Your Novel

The best advice I’ve ever heard in regards to writing the first page of a novel is that you should, counter to all instincts, never try to write it first.

The reasons behind this advice make sense. The first page has to do a lot of work. It’s entirely possible that, when you begin writing a story, you simply don’t know it well enough to write your first pages.

Because there are a lot of things your first page needs to do, and lot of ways it can go wrong.

What Your First Page Needs To Do

The first page of your novel is very likely the thing that people read after the jacket copy and before they decide to buy (or not). I don’t know about you, but that’s certainly how I vet books.

I’ll pick up a book because the cover copy grabs my attention, but then I flip to the first page. If I’m still standing there reading it three minutes later, if I can’t bear to put it down and leave it behind, well – I’m going to have to buy it.

There are five things that, if they’re done well on the first page, will keep me reading (and eventually buying) your book. The first page of your book must:

  • Introduce your narrator. This seems like a no brainer, but a lot of manuscripts I’ve read in workshops spend A LOT of time setting the scene of their story. Important, yes, but not as important as introducing me to the character I’m going to give a shit about for the next 300+ pages.
  • Establish us in time and place. Some books cheat this one and simply use the date and place in a chapter title, like: San Francisco 2001. I’m okay with that, but even with the cheat, I want to read about the time and place in the prose, right off. Show me the foggy streets, let me smell the coffee, have someone ride past on a segway.
  • Set the tone. If it’s funny, make me laugh. If it’s a sweeping epic novel, use language that feels as much. If it’s a modern, skeptical story, throw in some curse words.
  • Demonstrate your writing chops. Take time with your first sentences. Consider how they represent you as a writer. Let them be beautiful (or hard, or scathing or languid – whatever you’re going for). At the very least, make sure everything is grammatically accurate (sometimes – I’m looking at the self-publishing folks here – hiring a copy editor can make all the difference).
  • Hint at the story to come. To keep me reading you have to show me a character who wants something (your character needs to want something), then pose the question: will your main character get whatever it is they want?

Ways Those First Pages Can Go Wrong

Some ways you can fuck it up right quick:

  • Open with a dream sequence. Apparently this is a big pet peeve of agents and editors. I have to agree. If you suck us into a world, get us invested what is happening, why (oh why!?!) would you yank us from that by making it all a dream. Don’t do it. It’s annoying.
  • Be unclear in any way about what’s happening. If I can’t follow what’s happening in the first page of your story, odds are the situation is not going to improve. Keep it simple. Stay in scene. Don’t jump to flashbacks too quickly or try to pack in a ton of backstory. Get us on board before you do anything crazy.
  • Use too many names right up front. If I feel the need to diagram the characters in your novel to keep track of who’s who, I’m putting the book down. I don’t want to work that hard. Give names where they’re important, when the character is important. Let the community of characters unfold gently.
  • Try to tell a lot of backstory too early. I heard some writer somewhere (Isabel Allende, maybe?) say that she has to write a hundred pages before she finds page 1. Those 100 pages get cut and become the back story – the stuff she needed to know about the story before starting, but it doesn’t belong at the front. She weaves it into the story as she writes it, dropping bits of backstory where it’s needed.

So Where to Start?

Knowing that our first pages are so important can make them feel pretty weighty when you sit down to write. It’s easy enough to say “write the first page last,” but in actuality, you do have to write something first, and isn’t that, by definition, the first page?

I have two suggestions:

  1. Go ahead and write the opening scene as you see it in your head, but understand and accept that it will probably change. OR
  2. Don’t start at the beginning. Start writing somewhere in the middle. Jump around. Just because we read from front to back, doesn’t mean you have to write that way.

How do you deal with the first page? Do you write it first or last? How do you know where to start your story?

Why I Write

Last week, I was in an online discussion with a group of fellow writers, and a thought-provoking topic surfaced: Why do we write? What drives us to spend countless hours creating characters, crafting worlds, and subjecting these figments of our … [Continue reading] about Why I Write

You Have to Ask

ask

I had lunch with a writer friend a while back who had finished her novel and was preparing to query agents. She was understandably nervous about putting her work out into the world and was working really hard to get everything (synopsis, query … [Continue reading] about You Have to Ask